Category: Philosophy
-
Kant and the Problem of Nothingness: A Latin American Study and Critique
Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla’s Kant and the Problem of Nothingness, recently translated into English by Addison Ellis, marks a pivotal recovery of a neglected yet profoundly original philosophical voice from Latin America. Originally published in 1965, Mayz Vallenilla’s text undertakes a systematic investigation of the concept of nothing (nada) within the architecture of Kant’s Critique of…
-
Welt und Zeit—From Zizians to Zizekians, 22:39—5. March 2025
From the earliest rumblings of philosophical rumination on the nature of being, there has always dwelled a fascination with the exchanges between ruptures in social order and the structures of thought that attempt to subdue or master them. Yet in an era where so many convictions claim to grasp the meaning of world and time,…
-
Welt und Zeit—With Us, Capitalism is Genocide, 21:44—5. March 2025
World and time, as an unfolding of existential and historical questioning, compels us to confront the fundamental structures of being-in-the-world. Yet the gravity of our historical moment demands that we focus our reflections upon capitalism as a manifestation of an ever-unfolding logic of annihilation. This annihilation, hidden beneath the veneer of progress and technological advancement,…
-
Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France | 2 Volumes
In these two volumes, drawn together under the common title Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, a rich panorama of philosophical exchange emerges, one that gently but decisively overturns many entrenched perspectives on the reception of German Idealism. From the outset, the books proclaim a sweeping project: they place before our eyes the overlooked…
-
Welt und Zeit—Emerging Fields, 12:03—1. March 2025
Just as knowledge advances by questioning its own presuppositions, so too do emerging fields of study arise when reality presents phenomena that confound established categories. These nascent disciplines – often interdisciplinary and liminal in nature – reflect a transformation in the ontological landscape of the present age. They beckon philosophy to interrogate not only their…
-
Welt und Zeit—Acumen & Evil, 04:48—1. March 2025
Acumen, that razor-edged acuity of mind, occupies a paradoxical space at the intersection of knowledge and morality. It denotes a keen, incisive intelligence—a capacity to discern subtleties and penetrate complexities—and yet this very sharpness can cut either way. We often celebrate acumen as a virtue of the intellect, but the ontological question arises: what is…
-
Welt und Zeit—Tutankamon, The Son-King, 22:58—27. February 2025
Time and myth combine in a tense fabric of human reality, where ancient narratives echo through the ages to fracture eras and fuel conflicts. In the present day’s turbulent political events, one discerns the shadows of primordial mythological structures—old gods and founding heroes haunting modern battlefields. The life of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankamon (Tutankhamun) offers…
-
Welt und Zeit—The Micropolitics of Borders, 18:07—27. February 2025
In the aftermath of our collective reflections, it becomes necessary to redirect our gaze toward an investigation of those subtle thresholds that so often remain invisible yet determine the structure of political existence. In this, the analysis delves into what Michel Foucault famously labeled the micropolitics of power, but here specifically applied to borders, their…
-
Eraserhead, The David Lynch Files: Volume 1: The Full Story of One of the Strangest Films Ever Made.
A mesmerizing portrait of artistic perseverance and cinematic innovation, Eraserhead, The David Lynch Files: Volume 1 by Kenneth George Godwin unfolds as a strikingly thorough account of one of cinema’s most confounding and compelling debuts. Written at a time when the film was still a fresh wound in the collective imagination, it combines rigorous journalistic…
-
Welt und Zeit—The End of a War, 21:00—24. February 2025
In the wake of my previous contemplations and explorations in In the Wake of Thought, where the stirring question of thought’s perpetual unfolding demanded ever deeper considerations of human agency and temporal unfolding, it becomes necessary now to gather the threads of ontology, history, and politics in a new tapestry titled Welt und Zeit (World…
-
Welt und Zeit—Disgusting Sexuality, Sex & Disgust, 20:35—23. February 2025
The intersection of sexuality is struck with the immediate affective realm of disgust, and one is invariably drawn into an ever-expanding contemplation that touches upon the most fundamental nature of being. The trajectory of this reflection, framed within the broader horizon often invoked by the name of World & Time, finds itself confronted by contradictions,…
-
Welt und Zeit—Of the Abyss & the Void, 20:27—22. February 2025
In the tremors of our contemporary world, where the horizon of certainty has fractured under the weight of unprecedented shifts, one confronts two primordial dimensions that shape every aspect of existence: the abyss and the void. The two, at once unsettling and generative, stand at the heart of the human project, calling into question the…
-
Welt und Zeit—Censorship, 18:01—12. Februar 2025
Censorship is the strategic suppression of expression, a force that operates in the intercourse of power and knowledge, visibility and invisibility, silence and speech. It is at once an act of negation—the erasure of words, ideas, and images from the public sphere—and an act of production, shaping what can be thought, said, and ultimately, what…
-
Welt und Zeit—Destiny, 10:47—12. Februar 2025
Destiny names the abiding sense that certain outcomes or paths in life are foreordained, bound up in a cosmic or existential ordering that transcends conscious decision. Thrust into popular imagination as well as philosophical discourse, destiny often merges with fate, suggesting a hidden design or necessity that governs the arc of events. Although they both…
-
Welt und Zeit—Disaster, 18:19—11. Februar 2025
Disaster is a threshold concept that captures the rupture, the sudden and devastating break, that disrupts the continuity of collective life. It conjures visions of apocalypse, catastrophe, cataclysm, ruin, and end, all of which speak to the collapse of presumed orders and the shattering of expectations. While the word “disaster” can be applied to singular…
-
Welt und Zeit—Illusion, 17:36—11. Februar 2025
Illusion occupies a paradoxical position at the heart of human experience, engaging solace and self-deception, hope and distortion, and binding the subject to both personal fantasy and broader cultural constructs. In its most elementary sense, illusion captivates through the promise of protection from the rigors of daily existence; yet, as analytic insight teaches, it can…
-
Welt und Zeit—Ontology, 17:23—11. Februar 2025
Ontology is the relentless unveiling of what it means for anything—and everything—to be, the ceaseless attempt to articulate the fundamental structures undergirding existence and to recognize the shared horizon in which human beings encounter a world they simultaneously constitute and inhabit. Ontology is not merely a catalog of entities or a bare enumeration of concepts;…
-
Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger
In Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger, Brian Harding makes an uncompromising examination of how Niccolò Machiavelli’s insight into violence, sacrifice, and political foundations resonates with, and even anticipates, the sometimes elusive and frequently provocative inquiries of twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy. Harding’s study combines historical awareness, hermeneutical sensitivity,…
-
Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse
Richard Wolin’s Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse offers an intensely searching investigation of a painful paradox at the intersection of twentieth-century German philosophy, Jewish intellectual life, and the darkest political upheavals of modern Europe. The book revolves around the unsettling spectacle of Martin Heidegger, an unmatched philosophical presence whose…
-
The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism
In an era where chaos reigns and disasters unfold with alarming frequency, Naomi Klein’s seminal work, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, emerged as an unsettling exploration of how power is wielded amidst turmoil. Heralded by luminaries such as John le Carré, who described it as “impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary…
-
Conceptless Schemata: The Reciprocity of Imagination and Understanding in Kant’s Aesthetics
This paper examines Kant’s concept-less schematism in the Critique of Judgment and makes three key claims: 1) concept-less schematism is fully consistent with the schematism presented in the Critique of Pure Reason; 2) concept-less schematism refers to schematism that does not yield an empirical concept as its result; and 3) in light of 1) and…
-
G.W.F. Hegel: The Philosophical Propaedeutic
The Philosophical Propaedeutic is a unique and invaluable entry in the corpus of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, offering an accessible yet profound encapsulation of his mature philosophical system. Composed between 1808 and 1811 as notes for his lectures, this work distills the complexities of Hegel’s thought into a form that retains both simplicity and depth,…
-
A Short History of German Philosophy
A Short History of German Philosophy by Vittorio Hösle explores through the rich landscape of German philosophical thought, charting its evolution from the Middle Ages to contemporary times. With a masterful blend of clarity and depth, Hösle navigates through complex ideas, making them accessible to a broad audience without sacrificing intellectual rigor. The book opens…
Simon Gros 